Modern: Immortal Spirits

It’s Tuesday O’Clock! Time for a deck tech!

Hello and welcome to Only On Tuesdays. Today is a special day for me, because I will be going over one of my all time favorite decks that I ever made. This was one of the first decks that I ever made, and it proved to be far more powerful than I imagined it would be. The name of the deck is Immortal Spirits, and it is focused on the combo between Gift of Immortality and Selfless Spirit in order to give your creatures indestructible for the rest of the game.

I first discovered this combo when I was getting back into magic. I had heard of this format called commander that a lot of people at my college played, and I wanted to be a part of it. I grabbed all of the cards I owned and barely had enough cards to make an Avacyn, Guardian Angel deck. I showed up super excited to play with this brand new deck that I had spent an hour building. That was easily one of the worst decks that I have ever made. My first game with this pittance of a deck was up against commander all-stars such as Sheoldred, and Xenagos. I was way out of my league, and I knew it. However, despite this difference between us players, I did my best. I wasn’t expecting to win, but I saw a sweet combo in my hand and decided to play it. When I enchanted my spirit with the spell though everyone went nuts. I had no idea what I was doing though, and they had to explain how I could give my creatures indestructible for every turn of the game. It was awesome, and even though I lost that game I was determined to build a deck based off of this combo.

I spent the next month, building and rebuilding a spirit tribal deck meant to abuse this card. I knew very little about Modern at the time, but I was determined to build something powerful. I had a very tight budget at the time, and so the idea of spending 100 dollars on this one deck daunted me, but I was determined to make it work. I remember collecting each individual card, as this deck of mine slowly became a reality. It was more than just a single night building the deck, and then purchasing all of the cards at once. It was a journey, and as you can probably tell by the cover art it has influenced me and what I play now. While this first deck of mine has gone through many iterations, and no longer exists, what I am going to present to you today is the best version of the Selfless Gift combo that I can create. Without further adieu, let’s get on to the deck!

While Immortal Spirits may have been initially built with the full intent of abusing Gift of Immortality, I discovered a way to make that an important part of the deck, but not cripple it by becoming so single minded. In my first iterations of the deck I had Gift of Immortality as a 4 of because I wanted to see it every single game. This ended up hurting my gameplay as sometimes I would draw a Gift without any creatures to play it on. I was about to hang up my beloved combo until I discovered the card Tallowisp. Being able to grab a Gift of Immortality the turn you play Selfless Spirit is exactly what this deck needed, and it has the added benefit of grabbing a Steel of the Godhead for your Geist of Saint Traft, and also tutoring for removal. Tallowisp opened the deck up to many more options of play, and is what gave the deck a lot of unexpected strength.

While this deck may have been built with Selfless Spirit and Gift in mind, I chose the Spirits shell because a lot of good spirit cards interact very favorably with Gift of Immortality. Mausoleum Wanderer is a Force Spike every turn of the game against a spellslinger deck. Geist of Saint Traft no longer dies due to attacking, and Gift makes Drogskol Captain that much harder to remove. One of the greatest strengths of playing a spirit deck is how hard it is to remove them. Adding onto that suite of protection with auras such as Gift of Immortality and Hyena Umbra makes them a massive pain to deal with.

Another great strength of this deck is the ability of it to change based on what you need. The Tallowisp package allows you to play around with literally any aura you want. If you want to play a more aggressive version of the deck, you can put in more Unstable Mutations and try to race your opponent. If you want to play a slower more control style deck, you can do that with cards such as Curiosity, and you can even run one-sided sweepers such as Wrath of God because Selfless Spirit will be protecting your board from the nukes. It is very easy to tweak and still have a powerful deck. Playing spirits has taught me a lot about the kind of player that I like to be, and I hope that it can do the same for you.

Spirits is also a really good tribe to invest into because of the avenues of upgrade that are available to the deck. While this deck may be on the cheap side for a modern deck, it can get you that much closer to far more competitive decks such as Bant Spirits, or even Jeskai Control. Until you get a chance to have those cards though, you still have a powerful and fun deck that you can bring each week to FNM and tune however you see fit. Spirits is an amazingly fun archetype and I hope that this deck tech was able to inspire you. Until next time, have a great week and an amazing Tuesday!